As the number of wireless cellular data communication devices continues to increase and as their data capabilities continue to be more and more heavily used, the demands on available infrastructure and frequencies continue to increase. The addition of infrastructure to meet demand is costly, and is becoming more and more difficult as unoccupied space suitable for placement of larger base stations diminishes. In addition, as saturation of available wireless communication frequencies approaches, addition of conventional infrastructure approaches a point of ineffectiveness.
In order to support the growing demand for data communication services, therefore, network operators are turning more and more to managing existing resources, particularly frequency resources, so as to increase the number of users served by the resources. In order to accomplish such an increase, operators are constantly seeking to increase the efficiency of their use of resources, and one approach to such an increase in efficiency is through control of the elevation of radio frequency (RF) beams to perform vertical sectorization—that is, to control the elevation pattern of an RF beam so as to define additional sectors beyond those that can be defined simply through control of azimuth.